Now in its 6th year, the ESPC Community Awards promote and celebrate excellence, innovation and outstanding contributions in the European SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure Community.

The results are now in and we are delighted to announce the 2017 European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Community Awards winners.

Best Intranet/Extranet Solution: Valo Intranet

Award-winning Valo Intranet is a Ready-to-go Modern Intranet on Office 365 and SharePoint

Valo Intranet is the true front door to your digital workplace. It is the centre of all communication, social interaction and teamwork in your organization with a beautiful user experience. Valo works with every device (mobile, tablet, desktop), it is always up-to-date, and you can start using it immediately.

Already 250 customers and 500 000+ end users are using Valo Intranet in their daily work. Valo Intranet clientele includes global brands like Goodbaby (China), Fiskars (Finland), Helaba (Germany), IAEA (Austria), Royal Bank of Scotland (UK), Staples (NL), VodafoneZiggo (NL) and Watts (Chile).

Valo Intranet is a product of Blue Meteorite, 3-time Microsoft Gold Partner and the Microsoft Country Partner of the Year Award winner for 2016.

Valo Intranet is not just a product, we are an ecosystem full of SharePoint experts from around the world! Our rapidly growing Valo Intranet Partner Network includes already 100+ partners from 30+ countries. In Europe Valo customers are from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and UK. In addition, we have partners in Switzerland, Portugal, Poland.  Also Microsoft MVPs love Valo Intranet. We have 3 MVPs the Valo Team and 30+ MVPs in the Valo Partner Network.

Valo includes all the most popular intranet features in one package, such as Company News, easy-to-edit content pages, Quick Links, MyTools, Events & Trainings, People Finder, Social Hub, Blogs, Surveys, Forms, Idea Management and Admin Toolpack

Valo’s Teamwork module is fixing the Microsoft communication chaos by bringing Office 365 Groups, modern SharePoint team sites, Yammer, Teams, Planner and OneDrive together in a meaningful way. Valo supports multilingual intranets and supports 17 languages out of the box.

Technically Valo is super advanced fully leveraging all the latest platform capabilities such as SharePoint Framework and features of the Modern SharePoint, Stream, Flow and PowerApps.

Best Management Solution – SPDocKit by SysKit

SPDocKit is an enterprise solution for SharePoint management and administration developed by SysKit Ltd. The tool is intended for SharePoint administrators and consultants to automatically generate SharePoint farm documentation, manage SharePoint and SharePoint Online permissions, enforce governance policies, compare farms, and monitor farm health. With SPDocKit administrators can also analyze farm configuration based on community best practices.

SPDocKit offers new ways to manage a SharePoint environment and this significantly improves day-to-day operations—save time and resources with automated administration tasks.

Best Mobile Solution – Colligo

With 10 years of SharePoint-centric expertise, Colligo is a leading provider of collaborative apps for the mobile digital workplace, extending Microsoft SharePoint with a focus on achieving 100 percent user adoption. Our software enables workers with easy, anytime access to content stored on these enterprise information systems, regardless of device or connectivity, while giving non-IT administrators clear visibility to auditable user adoption metrics.

The Colligo Engage platform is the complete solution for balancing productivity and governance in the mobile digital workplace. Colligo Engage consists of a set of native apps—Colligo Briefcase and Colligo Email Manager—built with user experience in mind. All of our apps use caching for seamless performance, and our client-side synch technology eliminates the need for intermediate servers, dramatically reducing the risk to your data. Our cloud-based administrator tool, Colligo Console, enables non-IT users to harness the power of central SharePoint configuration without the complexity.

Colligo extends the capabilities of SharePoint, helping your mobile teams and workers to securely collaborate on content whether online or offline, while making it easy for managers to centrally control configuration and content policies, ensuring governance and compliance.

Best Office 365 Add-In – KanBo – Extending Portfolio Management for Office 365

In the modern workplace, executive teams need more than weekly reports on what is happening within their organizations – they require granular access into the work being done, and the ability to interact directly with managers and task owners in context to the work being done. KanBo provides top-down visibility into specific projects, and visibility into the portfolio of projects and initiatives underway within an organization. All of this is provided through a single-pane of glass, giving executive teams the ability to ask questions, discuss changing priorities, and have real-time visibility into the details of project schedules.

Many of the Project and Portfolio Management options within the Office 365 platform today are too simplistic to meet the advanced requirements of most teams. KanBo is a portfolio, project, and task management solution all-in-one, working as an integrated part of Office 365. KanBo leverages all of the foundational services of Office 365 and Azure rather than pointing you to outside services. In fact, KanBo works across the products you already use every day, such as SharePoint, Office Groups, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams. Within Teams, you can leverage individual project plans (boards) in KanBo within channels as a Tab, see activities journaled through a Connector, and interact with our Bot (K-Bot), with all users managed through Azure Active Directory.

But the real power of KanBo is its ability to keep your team moving forward by tracking all relevant information in one place. Whether an executive, manager, or end user, KanBo allows you to organize all projects, tasks, deadlines, and conversations into one place – and provides an aggregated view of your projects and tasks.

KanBo allows you to capture all relevant information, documents, and conversations in the context of a card, eliminating the need for time-consuming inquiries, and simplifying the coordination of tasks between team members. You receive the overview you need, without the hassle, while your team stays aligned and focused. Assign people, attach files, notes, and checklists, and discuss details by posting comments as well as other Office 365 artefacts. Cards provide a quick overview of what’s being done, without being slowed down by status emails and reporting.

The portfolio view within KanBo supercharges the decision-making for executives as it is always up to date, and allows them to switch their views on the work being done from time, people, status and milestone perspectives. KanBo helps the team visualize the progress of tasks in real-time. The most prominent example is the calendar-based view into all active tasks, giving your team a single view into everything past-due, in progress, and coming up in the schedule. Users can sync KanBo cards (topics or tasks) that are relevant to them with Outlook Task Lists or Calendars – the sync with KanBo is bi-directional.

Within Microsoft teams, portfolio management is greatly improved by the K-Bot functionality. The K-Bot is more than a digital assistant executing simple tasks, such as creating new cards, adding comments, or setting due dates. It acts as an “advisor” that can identify the critical path, suggest tasks or milestones that require your full attention, or estimate project impacts and delays should a key employee become unavailable. Instead of creating reports, executives can ask K-Bot for real-time insights.

KanBo is deeply integrated into the Office 365 platform, and is one of the most flexible solutions on the market for project and portfolio management, scaling from small teams to enterprise organizations. And when projects extend beyond the firewall, KanBo enables organizations to share project details and card activities with external users and partners, reducing the productivity-killing context-switching between systems.

Most Innovative SharePoint Solution – LiveTiles

LiveTiles began as an Australian startup company in 2014. Driven by the vision to create a user-centric platform to help organizations collaborate, founders Karl Redenbach and Peter Nguyen-Brown imagined the concept of software that prioritizes the human experience without compromising function. Since then, LiveTiles has established headquarters in New York City, and expanded from offering two technology solutions to providing a suite of complementing products that serve small and large businesses across all industries of every size.

LiveTiles is a no code, out of the box solution that gives users the ability to create a digital workplace the entire business can use. LiveTiles provides a user-friendly canvas deployed over SharePoint, Office 365 or Azure and a library of pre-coded ‘drag and drop’ features that gives users the flexibility to build a digital workplace that is mobile friendly, and integrates their business applications. Traditionally the realm of IT professionals, anyone can use LiveTiles to build an engaging dashboard for their organization that integrates business applications, displays resources, news items or embed social media feeds. Some of world’s biggest companies are building a flexible modern workplace with LiveTiles.

LiveTiles software empowers staff with the ability to surface and integrate scattered business apps, resources, files and more on a single pane of glass over Office 365, SharePoint and Azure. Products include LiveTiles SharePoint; LiveTiles Mosaic for education, free to K-12 schools; and LiveTiles Cloud, the Azure-hosted version of LiveTiles SharePoint.